Prof. Don MCLEISH

Transforming Africa with Actuarial Science

Expertise: Probability and Stochastic Processes, Statistical Inference and Monte Carlo Methods

Professor McLeish's research interests cover a variety of areas including probability and stochastic processes, statistical inference using estimating functions, and applications of Monte Carlo methods to finance.

Professor McLeish is a member of the SSC, the American Statistical Association, and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He has consulted with various companies in the financial services industry, and with the Ministry of Transportation of Ontario, and has organized the annual meeting of the SSC and a workshop on missing data. He has held appointments at York University, the University of Alberta, the University of Toronto, the University of Auckland, and the University of Michigan.

Professor McLeish's interest in statistical models for financial data includes the application of wide-tail alternatives to the normal distribution such as stable processes, and the consequences for derivatives and asset pricing. The application of Monte Carlo techniques, variance reduction, etc. and stochastic calculus to problems in finance are also of interest. Particularly, involving estimating the sensitivity of a simulation to the choice of underlying parameters and missing and incomplete data problems in finance. His interest in finance helped lead to the creation of the collaborative master's program in finance and the Center for Advanced Studies in Finance and the text Monte Carlo Simulation and Finance, Wiley, 2005.

Professor McLeishs's also has an interest in statistical inference, particularly applications of inference or estimating functions and related Hilbert space and projection methods in statistics. These have many interesting applications from problems involving with nuisance parameters, missing and censored data problems, inference for stochastic processes to the building of analogues of likelihood methods even when lack of a dominating measure make maximum likelihood impossible. These interests led to the book and monograph written jointly with Christopher Small.

Professor McLeish continues to work on some problems of interest in biostatistics, bioassay and experimental design, particularly sequential design for estimating extreme quantiles in bioassay and missing data problems in regression. Past work includes Central Limit Theorems and invariance principles for martingales, mixing sequences of random variables, and other dependent variables as well as martingales, their applications and inference for stochastic processes.

Prof. McLeish has taught at AIMS Ghana.

For more: University of Waterloo Biography